The water is the temperature of blood. Under a white-hot sky the swimming hole at Dalhousie Springs is fringed with thick reeds and creamy-flowered, paper-barked Melaleucas. Long-billed corellas on drooping branches watch me float. Slightly saline, a whiff of sulphur suggests the decades, centuries, the millennia that this water has been seeping through aquifers of the Great Artesian Basin. After days of dusty driving the relief of bathing in silky warmth lulls me to thinking that there’s plenty of water after all. Trickling emergences of water in the desert remind me of the importance of an inner life, something beyond … Continue reading Groundwater